At this time last year, I was in New Jersey trying to decide between 16 other schools, probably one of the most thought out decisions I have ever made in my life. I asked for advice from my coaches, elders, friends even school janitors but at the end of the day it is about finding a place that makes you feel welcomed and makes you feel like you’re at home. University of New England met all of my criteria plus more. After I committed to play football here most of my expectations for college were spaced out on the order of things that were being thrown at me, I chose to just focus on the things that were thrown at me and attack them in that order. I did this, so I do not stress myself out over one aspect of college when there is plenty of other things that I could stress about.

My first expectation, was all about football, the offseason workout, my performance during camp, would I even make it through camp? My mind was completely revolving around football which isn’t a bad thing because I ended up starting as a freshman and making an impact on the team. From an academic stand point I knew it was going to be hard, this is a different kind of hard, I definitely thought we would be reading way more than we did this year. On the other hand, we did a lot more writing than I thought we would, it is kind of like I was right, but I wasn’t the roles just switched.

Writing is my strong suit, so in high school writing was not hard at all for me, mainly because we barley wrote and when we did it was a one page paper, I would just follow the five P’s aspect with those essays, but come to find out in college I am told to forget everything I learned in high school because I am going to be learning the exact opposite. There goes four years of work down the drain. Great.

Forgetting wasn’t the hard part though, it was learning the opposite because I found myself doing the same things I was taught to do in high school multiple times before I really forgot everything. Looking at it from the perspective of a first-year student who is getting ready to wrap up his first semester as a college student, forgetting that helped me in many ways. One way is it helped open up the amount of ways I could write a simple essay or lab report. It’s kind of like they opened up a new form of trust in the student telling them that they trust them to write an essay or label report with really no format to follow step by step.

Habits of the creative mind was a big help in trying to forget and learn a bunch of new writing styles and a bunch of new ways to format my writing.